8/19/2010 @ 12:10PM

Abigail Disney Isn't Interested In Cinderella Stories

Abigail Disney grew up in the shadow of her last name. Roy and Walt–her grandfather and great-uncle, respectively–are legends of the entertainment business. Abigail, now 50, idealistic and politically aware, spent years quietly volunteering for charities, serving on boards and eventually starting two of her own nonprofits. Now, continuing the family legacy, she has turned to film. Not to entertain, but to educate.

No Mickey Mouse for this Disney. Growing up around the Hollywood glitterati, she realized she didn’t much like the entertainment industry, especially its obsession with appearance. She was a serious student, graduating from Yale and Stanford before moving to New York to complete her doctorate in English literature at Columbia University. In 1989, having returned from her honeymoon and about to start her dissertation, Disney felt somewhat rootless. She began volunteering at the Robin Hood Foundation, a large inner city-focused nonprofit founded by billionaire Paul Tudor Jones, as well as at a few other large child-focused charities.

Warm, intelligent and driven–and with a famous name–Disney quickly established a reputation as an effective fundraiser, and soon she was serving on the boards of 12 nonprofit organizations. The mother of four found herself increasingly drawn to groups that focused on women. She says they seemed to encompass the needs of everyone in a community.

Her interest in women’s issues served as a natural segue into her documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. The film, which she made in two years on a relative shoestring of $700,000, premiered at the TriBeCa Film Festival in 2008 and won the Jury Prize for Best Documentary. It told the story of a movement of local women who had helped bring peace to Liberia by pressuring the warlord Charles Taylor, who was allegedly using drugged teen boys to commit atrocities such as rape and beheadings, to stop warring with the rebels who challenged him. After succeeding, these women later helped elect Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf president.

The success of Pray the Devil led to a project with Wide Angle, a series on WNET, New York’s public television station. In spring of 2011 Wide Angle will air five films produced by Disney (including Pray the Devil) that depict the unique horrors faced by women in Afghanistan, Colombia, Bosnia, Congo and Liberia in war. They are wrapping up the final episode in Afghanistan, where the crew is trying to hook up a so-called “burqa cam.”

ForbesWoman sat down with Disney at the headquarters of her production company, Fork Films, and her nonprofit, the Daphne Foundation, to discuss filmmaking, women in war and how she has embraced being a Disney.

You’re mainly focused on working for the rights and welfare of women. Is it because you’re a woman?

No. As I worked with grassroots organizations [both domestically and overseas], I realized that all these women leaders had the same values and ethics. They were all feisty and interesting. Women try to build for their entire communities.

I began to realize–ahead of most people, I think–that women are the webs of relationships. When you strengthen women, you strengthen the world.

Why is the topic of women and war important?

When men talk about war, the stories and terminology vary–it’s this battle, these weapons, this terrain. But no matter where you go in the world, women use the same language to speak of war. They speak of fire, they speak of death and they speak of starvation. News reports don’t look at the land that existed before a war and the land that exists after a war. Reporting on war is a snapshot in time. Women exist in a continuum, both before and after.

I think if we understand better the impact of war on women and children, we might be more careful about the wars we start.

Women participate in war as well. There are female suicide bombers, for example. Do you worry that you’re just depicting women in war as innocent victims and bystanders?

Look, any war that women get involved in was started by men. And anyone who’s a suicide bomber–male or female–is clearly sick. But I want to be clear. I don’t think there’s some kind of gender-based reason for why men start wars and women don’t. The fact is simply that in society it is women who have been given the job of carrying on with the activities of life and death. So they are the ones who are most affected by war.

Tell me about the process of making Pray the Devil.

When I was in Liberia and heard about the women, I assumed that major media outlets had covered the whole episode. I was wrong. The only news coverage was about Charles Taylor and the warlords and nothing about the effects of the fighting on mothers and children. For footage, we ended up turning to local cameramen, nongovernmental organizations and international news agencies to piece the story together into a narrative.

The director I hired was a documentary filmmaker, Gini Reticker, who had already made movies about African women in war. I actually met her at a ballgame where our daughters were playing.

Has the movie had wide distribution?

I’m proud to say it has been seen in 32 countries. People identify with it. We had a very unusual distribution strategy: We networked with churches and foundations and encouraged them to do their own screenings. For $295 they can buy the license to the movie online. For that price, an organization, church or whoever can show it wherever they want, as often as they want. It also had a theatrical release.

How did you finance the movie?

I self-funded it because I didn’t want to have to do fundraising. I realized later that was a big mistake! Everyone assumed it was just a vanity project. So I now call it “very expensive film school.” So for the Wide Angle series, I’m trying to raise $4 million. I’m most of the way there.

How did Fork Films come about, and is there any significance to the name?

It grew out of the making of Pray the Devil. Besides that movie and the series for Wide Angle, Fork Films also produced Family Affair, a first-person documentary about a family wracked with abuse, which was bought by Oprah Winfrey’s OWN [Oprah Winfrey Network].

I named the company “Fork” because of my son, Eamon. When he was 2 or 3 years old we had just gotten a kitten and everyone was shouting out their ideas for a name. He didn’t really understand what we were doing, so he just shouted out the first word he could think of: “fork!” We all just dissolved into laughter and even considered going with Fork as a name for a while, but it was too weird. Eamon was crushed, so I promised him the next thing I could name I would name Fork. And Voila.

And it wound up being very apt, since it represented a fork in my life’s path, and a very fortuitous one at that!

You also have two nonprofits, the Daphne Foundation and Peace is Loud. Tell me about those.

I started the Daphne Foundation with my husband 20 years ago. It fights poverty by making grants to New York City-based organizations that serve women. These groups are often too small to get the attention of the big foundations. Sometimes they just need some advice and support.

Peace is Loud is focused on women in conflict zones and grew out of Pray the Devil. Its goal is to help women’s voices be expressed in peace and in war. Peace is Loud recently funded a trip to the Congo to do workshops with women to show them how to promote peace. One of the participants is Leymah Gbowee, a leader in the women’s movement depicted in the movie.

How has your family name and legacy affected who you are?

Both my father [also named Roy] and grandfather taught me that when you know what your values are, it’s easy to make a decision. I idolize my grandfather. He built Disney World for Walt [after Walt's death]; it was the biggest civilian building project in U.S. history, and he did it without debt. When I went to Disney World with my kids, it was the first time I’d been there in 20 years. I saw a clean, safe town, with clean streets and good schools. I realized that this was [my grandfather's] social good. He and Walt were maybe more conservative than me, but both lived their values.